At first ap­prox­i­ma­tion, there are two mo­ti­va­tions for donat­ing money – ego­is­tic & al­tru­is­tic.

The ego­is­tic mo­ti­va­tion re­lates to the per­sonal benefit you ac­crue from giv­ing your money away. The al­tru­is­tic mo­ti­va­tion re­lates to the benefits that other peo­ple re­ceive from your dona­tions. (This roughly maps to the fuzzies vs. utilons (a) dis­tinc­tion.)

The ego­is­tic mo­ti­va­tion for donat­ing is scope insensitive

The ego­is­tic mo­ti­va­tion for donat­ing is highly scope in­sen­si­tive – giv­ing away $500 feels roughly as good as giv­ing away $50,000. I haven’t found any aca­demic ev­i­dence on this, but it’s been ro­bustly true in my ex­pe­rience.

This scope in­sen­si­tivity seems pretty baked in – know­ing about it doesn’t make it go away. I can re­mind my­self that I’m hav­ing 100x the im­pact when I donate $50,000 than when I donate $500, but I find that when I re­flect ca­su­ally about my dona­tions, I feel about as satis­fied at my small dona­tions as I do about my large ones, even af­ter re­peat­edly re­mind­ing my­self about the 100x differ­en­tial.

We’re prob­a­bly also scope in­sen­si­tive qual­i­ta­tively – giv­ing $5,000 to a low-im­pact char­ity feels about as good as giv­ing $5,000 to an effec­tive char­ity (es­pe­cially if you don’t re­flect very much about the im­pact of the dona­tion, and es­pe­cially es­pe­cially if the low-im­pact char­ity tells you a com­pel­ling story about the par­tic­u­lar peo­ple your dona­tion is helping).

Effec­tive giv­ing in­creases hap­piness, but so does low-im­pact giving

I think some­times im­plicit here is the claim that giv­ing effec­tively will in­crease your hap­piness (I think this be­cause al­most all other dis­cus­sion of giv­ing in EA spaces is about effec­tive giv­ing, and why effec­tive giv­ing is some­thing to get ex­cited about).

It seems pretty clear that donat­ing some money to char­ity will in­crease your hap­piness. It’s less clear that donat­ing to an effec­tive char­ity will make you hap­pier than donat­ing to a low-im­pact char­ity.

Given the scope in­sen­si­tivity of the ego­is­tic mo­ti­va­tion, it’s also un­clear that giv­ing away a lot of money will make you hap­pier than giv­ing away a small amount of money.

It seems es­pe­cially un­clear that the dona­tion-to-hap­piness link scales any­where lin­early. Per­haps donat­ing $1,000 makes you hap­pier than donat­ing $100, but does it make you 10x as happy? Does donat­ing $2,000 make you 2x as donat­ing $1,000? My in­tu­ition is that it doesn’t.

In­come in­creases hap­piness, up to a point

Okay, so that’s a bunch of dis­cus­sion from in­tu­ition & lived ex­pe­rience. Now let’s look at pa­per.

Jebb et al. 2018 an­a­lyzed Gal­lup Wor­ld­wide Poll sur­vey data on in­come & hap­piness. This dataset had re­sponses from about 1.7 mil­lion peo­ple in 164 coun­tries, so we don’t have to worry about small sam­ple size.

Jebb et al. were cu­ri­ous about the in­come sa­ti­a­tion effect – is there a point at which ad­di­tional in­come no longer con­tributes to sub­jec­tive well-be­ing? And if there is, where is it?

From the Gal­lup data, Jebb et al. found that there is in­deed an in­come sa­ti­a­tion effect:

An aside on terminology

“Sub­jec­tive well-be­ing” is the term so­cial sci­en­tists use to think about hap­piness. Re­searchers usu­ally break sub­jec­tive well-be­ing down into two com­po­nents – life eval­u­a­tion & emo­tional well-be­ing. Here are heavy­weights Daniel Kah­ne­man & An­gus Deaton on how those two things are differ­ent (a):

Emo­tional well-be­ing (some­times called he­do­nic well-be­ing or ex­pe­rienced hap­piness) refers to the emo­tional qual­ity of an in­di­vi­d­ual’s ev­ery­day ex­pe­rience – the fre­quency and in­ten­sity of ex­pe­riences of joy, fas­ci­na­tion, anx­iety, sad­ness, anger, and af­fec­tion that make one’s life pleas­ant or un­pleas­ant. Life eval­u­a­tion refers to a per­son’s thoughts about his or her life. Sur­veys of sub­jec­tive well-be­ing have tra­di­tion­ally em­pha­sized life eval­u­a­tion. The most com­monly asked ques­tion in these sur­veys is the life satis­fac­tion ques­tion: “How satis­fied are you with your life as a whole these days?” … Emo­tional well-be­ing is as­sessed by ques­tions about the pres­ence of var­i­ous emo­tions in the ex­pe­rience of yes­ter­day (e.g., en­joy­ment, hap­piness, anger, sad­ness, stress, worry).

Life eval­u­a­tion seems like the more in­tu­itive met­ric for our pur­poses here. (It’s also the more con­ser­va­tive choice due to its higher sa­ti­a­tion points.) So when I talk about “hap­piness,” I’m ac­tu­ally talk­ing about “sub­jec­tive well-be­ing as as­sessed by life eval­u­a­tion scores.” My main points would still hold if we fo­cused on emo­tional well-be­ing in­stead.

In­come in­creases hap­piness up to $115,000 /​ year

The in­come sa­ti­a­tion point for most EAs is at least $100,000 USD /​ year.

Most EAs are in North Amer­ica and Western Europe.

The sa­ti­a­tion point for life eval­u­a­tion in Western Europe is about $100,000 USD /​ year.

The life eval­u­a­tion sa­ti­a­tion point in North Amer­ica is about $105,000 USD /​ year.

Al­most all EAs fall into Jebb et al.’s “high ed­u­ca­tion” bracket: 16+ years of ed­u­ca­tion, i.e. on track to com­plete a Bach­e­lor’s.

High-ed­u­ca­tion pop­u­la­tions have higher sa­ti­a­tion points than low-ed­u­ca­tion pop­u­la­tions, an effect that the au­thors at­tribute to “in­come as­pira­tions or so­cial com­par­i­sons with differ­ent groups.”

The “high ed­u­ca­tion” sa­ti­a­tion point is $115,000 USD /​ year.

That’s a global figure. The pa­per doesn’t give a re­gion-by-re­gion break­out of the “high ed­u­ca­tion” co­hort; it’s likely that the figure is even higher in the Western Europe & North Amer­i­can re­gions, which have higher sa­ti­a­tion points than the global av­er­age.

Essen­tially, all in­come earned up to $115,000 USD /​ year (for col­lege-ed­u­cated folks liv­ing in North Amer­ica & Western Europe) con­tributes to one’s hap­piness.

Put­ting it all to­gether

We can use the Jebb et al. pa­per to in­fer that dona­tions which put your an­nual in­come be­low $115k will prob­a­bly make you less happy. (And if you’re giv­ing sub­stan­tial amounts while earn­ing a to­tal in­come of less than $115k, those dona­tions will prob­a­bly con­tribute to a de­crease in your hap­piness.)

There’s a wrin­kle here: it’s pos­si­ble that much of the hap­piness benefit of earn­ing a high in­come comes from the knowl­edge that you earn a high in­come, not what you use the money for ma­te­ri­ally. If this is the case, donat­ing large amounts out of an in­come above $115k shouldn’t ding your hap­piness.

So per­haps only a weaker ver­sion of the claim holds: once you achieve an an­nual in­come above $115,000, you can give away large por­tions of it with­out in­cur­ring a hap­piness penalty (hav­ing already re­al­ized the happy-mak­ing benefit of your earn­ings). But even in this case, donat­ing large amounts out of an in­come less than $115k still low­ers your hap­piness (be­cause you never benefit from the knowl­edge that you earn at least $115k).

It’s true that the act of donat­ing will gen­er­ate some per­sonal hap­piness. But given the scope in­sen­si­tivity at play here, you can re­al­ize a lot of this benefit by donat­ing small amounts (and thus keep­ing a lot more of your money, which can then be de­ployed in other happy-mak­ing ways).

From a purely ego­is­tic view­point, scope in­sen­si­tivity lets us have our cake & eat it too – we can feel good about our donat­ing be­hav­ior while keep­ing most of our money.

Con­clu­sion: EA shouldn’t say that effec­tive giv­ing will make you happy

There re­mains a strong al­tru­is­tic case to be made for effec­tive giv­ing, but I think it’s worth ac­knowl­edg­ing the real trade­off be­tween giv­ing away large amounts of money and one’s per­sonal hap­piness, at least for peo­ple earn­ing less than $115,000 USD /​ year (on av­er­age, for col­lege-ed­u­cated peo­ple in Western Europe & North Amer­ica). If you want to give large amounts while avoid­ing this trade­off, you should achieve a sta­ble an­nual in­come of at least $115k be­fore mak­ing sub­stan­tial dona­tions.

Fur­ther, EA should ac­tively dis­cour­age peo­ple from effec­tive giv­ing if they’re mainly con­sid­er­ing it as a way to be­come hap­pier. Effec­tive giv­ing prob­a­bly won’t make you hap­pier than low-im­pact giv­ing, and donat­ing large amounts won’t make you hap­pier than donat­ing small amounts. Say­ing oth­er­wise would be a false promise.

Thanks to Gre­gory Lewis, Howie Lem­pel, He­len Toner, Ben­jamin Pence, and an anony­mous col­lab­o­ra­tor for feed­back on drafts of this es­say. Cross-posted to my blog.

i) Like Greg I’ve only ever seen the claim that donat­ing some can be bet­ter for one’s own welfare, com­pared to a baseline of not giv­ing at all—not that the EA ap­proach to giv­ing is ac­tu­ally the op­ti­mal for hap­piness (!).

Giv­ing small amounts reg­u­larly to a va­ri­ety of emo­tion­ally ap­peal­ing causes is more likely to be op­ti­mal for one’s self­ish welfare, at least if you don’t have an EA mind­set which would ren­der that dis­satis­fy­ing. As you say, ‘give 10% once a year to the most effec­tive char­ity’ is likely worse than that.

ii) Un­for­tu­nately I don’t have time to look into whether your source on in­come sa­ti­a­tion points is bet­ter than the older one I used in my ar­ti­cle. Per­son­ally, I think a fo­cus on a ‘sa­ti­a­tion point’ at which in­come yields liter­ally zero fur­ther welfare gain is the wrong way to think about this. I am skep­ti­cal that the curve ever en­tirely flat­tens out, let alone turns back around. Rather I’d ex­pect log­a­r­ith­mic re­turns (or per­haps some­thing a bit sharper), up into the tens or hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars of in­come. Given the difficulty of mea­sur­ing satis­fac­tion, es­pe­cially in the up­per tail of in­come, I would trust this more com­mon sense model over em­piri­cal mea­sure­ments claiming oth­er­wise. Above ~$100,000, ad­di­tional gains in welfare are prob­a­bly just too small for our sur­vey meth­ods to pick up.

For this rea­son 80,000 Hours use more mod­est lan­guage like “any ex­tra in­come won’t af­fect your hap­piness that much”, rather than claiming the effect is noth­ing.

Nonethe­less, at high lev­els of in­come, fur­ther rais­ing one’s in­come grad­u­ally be­comes a minor is­sue, be­fore it be­comes an en­tirely un­mea­surable one. At that point, many peo­ple will bet­ter ac­com­plish their life goals by fo­cussing on im­prov­ing the world—thereby giv­ing them­selves more com­mu­nity, higher pur­pose, sense of ac­com­plish­ment, and in­deed ac­tual ac­com­plish­ment—rather than ek­ing out what limited re­turns re­main from higher earn­ings, and this seems im­por­tant to point out to peo­ple.

iii) So, while I say from an ego­ist per­spec­tive ‘give 10% once a year to the most effec­tive char­ity’ is prob­a­bly dom­i­nated by a ‘fuzzy-hack­ing’ ap­proach to char­ity, that’s not com­pletely ob­vi­ous.

Giv­ing larger amounts, and giv­ing them to the best char­i­ties one can find, of­ten be­comes a core part of peo­ple’s iden­tity, prob­a­bly rais­ing their sense of pur­pose /​ satis­fac­tion with their work at all times, rather than just via a warm glow im­me­di­ately af­ter they donate a small sum. I don’t think any of the ev­i­dence we’ve looked at can ad­dress this is­sue, ex­cept the ob­ser­va­tional stud­ies, which are hope­lessly con­founded by other things.

Fur­ther­more, be­ing part of effec­tive al­tru­ism or Giv­ing What We Can can provide par­ti­ci­pants with a com­mu­nity of peo­ple who they feel some con­nec­tion to, which many peo­ple oth­er­wise lack, and which seems to have a larger effect on hap­piness than money. Fi­nally, giv­ing to the best char­i­ties al­lows peo­ple to show off to them­selves about their un­com­mon in­tel­li­gence and so­phis­ti­ca­tion as a giver, which can also con­tribute to a pos­i­tive self-con­cep­tion.

We know that in­volve­ment in a re­li­gious com­mu­nity is cor­re­lated with large gains in welfare, and in­volve­ment in any philo­soph­i­cal com­mu­nity like effec­tive al­tru­ism seems likely to bring with it some—though not all—of the same benefits.

Of course there are down­sides too. In the ab­sence of any ac­tual data, I would re­main ag­nos­tic, and act as though this were more or less a wash for some­one’s hap­piness. I wouldn’t want some­one to start be­ing al­tru­is­tic ex­pect­ing it to make their life bet­ter, but I’d also want to challenge them if they were con­vinced it would make their life worse.

From this per­spec­tive, ar­ti­cles say­ing that giv­ing or other acts of al­tru­ism are not as detri­men­tal to some­one’s welfare as one might naïvely an­ti­ci­pate, seem to me to be ad­vanc­ing a rea­son­able point of view, even if fu­ture re­search may yet show them to be mis­taken.

I’ve only ever seen the claim that donat­ing some can be bet­ter for one’s own welfare, com­pared to a baseline of not giv­ing at all—not that the EA ap­proach to giv­ing is ac­tu­ally the op­ti­mal for hap­piness (!).

Re: the com­mu­nity benefits of EA, these mostly seem to ac­crue via ac­tive par­ti­ci­pa­tion in EA spaces (the Fo­rum, face­book groups, work­ing with EA orgs, at­tend­ing mee­tups & con­fer­ences), rather than by mak­ing large dona­tions.

Mak­ing dona­tions seems im­por­tant for feel­ing a sense of mem­ber­ship in the com­mu­nity, but I think this benefit can be re­al­ized by mak­ing nom­i­nal dona­tions only. (The 50th per­centile re­spon­dent to the 2018 EA sur­vey gave 2.9% of their in­come; I spec­u­late that folks who were mo­ti­vated enough to fill out the sur­vey prob­a­bly feel like part of the EA com­mu­nity.)

“EA some­times ad­vo­cates that giv­ing effec­tively will in­crease your hap­piness. Here’s an 80,000 Hours ar­ti­cle (a) to that effect. … This line of ar­gu­ment con­fuses the effect of donat­ing at all with the effect of donat­ing effec­tively.”

This ar­ti­cle you link to (by me) does not men­tion giv­ing large amounts, or the effec­tive­ness of char­i­ties, or ad­vo­cate for giv­ing to char­ity, so it’s hard to see how it could be con­fus­ing that is­sue. I would ap­pre­ci­ate if you could edit the ar­ti­cle to clar­ify that.

It also doesn’t claim that giv­ing nec­es­sar­ily makes you hap­pier than spend­ing the money on your­self, only that in a given case it is pos­si­ble—which it cer­tainly is—and that giv­ing likely pro­vides more satis­fac­tion than not hav­ing the money in the first place:

“Giv­ing some money to char­ity is un­likely to make you less happy, and may well make you hap­pier. … donat­ing money could eas­ily make you hap­pier than spend­ing it on your­self… there’s good rea­son to think that giv­ing away money will lower your sub­jec­tive well-be­ing sig­nifi­cantly less than not hav­ing it in the first place.”

In fact, the ar­ti­cle only tan­gen­tially dis­cusses dona­tions at all. Nonethe­less, I have added some fur­ther text to clar­ify my view.

Upvoted for bring­ing in a lot of cool re­search! Didn’t strong-up­vote be­cause I felt the con­clu­sion was a lit­tle too strong (“ac­tively dis­cour­age”, es­pe­cially), and I wish you’d linked to some ex­am­ples of EA pro­mot­ing ego­is­tic giv­ing.

2. Is there a par­tic­u­lar case of EA com­mu­ni­ca­tion that you think ac­tively goes against the sci­ence you cite? I vaguely re­mem­ber see­ing writ­ing in a few places along the lines of “giv­ing can make you hap­pier” or “giv­ing effec­tively can make you more con­fi­dent” (and by im­pli­ca­tion, hap­pier), but not “giv­ing more can make you hap­pier”.

3. It would be good to see one of these stud­ies speci­fi­cally take on EA-style giv­ing, where peo­ple of­ten have an un­usu­ally strong sense of what their money is buy­ing and can feel un­usu­ally con­fi­dent that it will ac­tu­ally help. Most char­i­ties don’t have any­thing nearly as im­mer­sive as GiveDirectly Live, a web­site which (to me) makes ev­ery ad­di­tional dol­lar I give pretty darn salient.

4. “Ac­tively dis­cour­ag­ing” peo­ple who want to use effec­tive giv­ing to be­come hap­pier seems far too strong. For one, the stud­ies you cite gen­er­ally look at large num­bers of peo­ple; even if giv­ing doesn’t make the av­er­age per­son hap­pier, it still seems like it could make any given in­di­vi­d­ual hap­pier.

If we want to give max­i­mally ac­cu­rate in­for­ma­tion, we could say “there are a lot of differ­ent things that might work, giv­ing is one, sav­ing your money might be bet­ter”, but our abil­ity to ad­vise in­di­vi­d­u­als seems re­ally con­text-de­pen­dent. I’ve known peo­ple who I thought would ac­tu­ally be a lot hap­pier upon donat­ing more; I’ve known other peo­ple for whom “get fi­nan­cially se­cure so you can have FYM ASAP” was bet­ter ego­cen­tric ad­vice.

5. Fi­nally, if some­one comes up to us and says “I just want to make my­self happy, should I give more?“...

...maybe we should, in­stead of say­ing “no”, say “why not con­sider try­ing to want other peo­ple to be happy, too?”

Be­com­ing more al­tru­is­tic in spirit/​per­son­al­ity seems to be pretty helpful for a lot of peo­ple. I don’t know how much the sci­ence backs that up, so I wouldn’t recom­mend it as an offi­cial re­sponse, but “car­ing about other peo­ple makes you happy” does seem like one of the strongest cross-cul­tural “com­mon sense” les­sons in all of hu­man ex­pe­rience.

I agree that the link is prob­a­bly heav­ily sub­lin­ear. But I won­der if it be­comes less sub­lin­ear if one is more con­scious of im­pact-per-dol­lar.

I’ve had this ex­pe­rience my­self, sort of, in that I be­gan to en­joy giv­ing more af­ter I found EA and my pre­vi­ous “well, I hope this works” feel­ing re­solved into “yes, I found the best deal on helping!“. And since I know that I’ve found a good deal with high-EV re­turns, giv­ing more does feel bet­ter, just as it would if I were de­posit­ing more money into a high-yield in­vest­ment. Mean­while, be­cause I have enough money to be ma­te­ri­ally com­fortable, the idea of “$1000 in sav­ings lets me skip work­ing for an­other two weeks in 40 years, as­sum­ing I even want to stop work­ing” doesn’t hold much ap­peal, com­pared to “spend­ing $1000 on one of the world’s best prod­ucts”.

This is cer­tainly true! Money can buy al­most any­thing, in­clud­ing se­cu­rity against fu­ture dis­asters. I’m only mak­ing a per­sonal claim about my­self and my own use of money. I per­son­ally of­ten feel like giv­ing is the form of spend­ing that will make me “hap­piest”, be­cause it feels like a di­rect path to me get­ting a sense of per­sonal satis­fac­tion in a way that sav­ing of­ten doesn’t.

Peo­ple are more likely to give when cer­tain mark­ers of “effec­tive­ness” are satis­fied (e.g. you tell them ex­actly how the money will be spent, you tell them the char­ity is rel­a­tively low-over­head, you tell them how much progress you’ve made to­ward solv­ing a prob­lem).

Th­ese claims come from what I re­mem­ber about writ­ing a the­sis on giv­ing be­hav­ior. The rele­vant ma­te­rial starts on p. 59, items (1), (4), and (6), though I’m syn­the­siz­ing a broader base of ev­i­dence here (plus a bit of in­tu­ition from my ex­pe­riences talk­ing about EA with peo­ple out­side the com­mu­nity).

Giv­ing some money to char­ity is un­likely to make you less happy, and may well make you hap­pier. (My em­pha­sis)

The GWWC piece reads thus:

Giv­ing 10% of your in­come to effec­tive char­i­ties can make an in­cred­ible differ­ence to some of the most de­prived peo­ple in the world. But what effect will giv­ing have on you? You may be con­cerned that it will dam­age your qual­ity of life and make you less happy. This is a perfectly rea­son­able con­cern, and there is no shame in want­ing to live a full and happy life.

The good news is that giv­ing can of­ten make you hap­pier.… (My em­pha­sis)

As I noted in prior dis­cus­sion, not only do these sources not claim ‘giv­ing effec­tively will in­crease your hap­piness’, I’m not aware of this be­ing claimed by any ma­jor EA source. Thus the ob­jec­tion “This line of ar­gu­ment con­fuses the effect of donat­ing at all with the effect of donat­ing effec­tively” tar­gets a straw man.

Re­gard­less of which ca­reer you choose, you can donate 10% of your in­come.

Nor­mally when we think of do­ing good with our ca­reers, we think of paths like be­com­ing a teacher or char­ity worker, which of­ten earn salaries as much as 50% lower than jobs in the pri­vate sec­tor, and may not al­ign with your skills or in­ter­ests. In that sense, giv­ing 10% is less of a sac­ri­fice.

More­over, as we saw in an ear­lier ar­ti­cle, once you start earn­ing more than about $40,000 a year as an in­di­vi­d­ual, any ex­tra in­come won’t af­fect your hap­piness that much, while acts that help oth­ers like giv­ing to char­ity prob­a­bly do make you hap­pier.

To take just one ex­am­ple, one study found that in 122 of 136 coun­tries, if re­spon­dents an­swered “yes” to the ques­tion “did you donate to char­ity last month?”, their life satis­fac­tion was higher by an amount also as­so­ci­ated with a dou­bling of in­come.5 In part, this is prob­a­bly be­cause hap­pier peo­ple give more, but we ex­pect some of the effect runs the other way too.

(Not per­suaded? Read more on whether giv­ing 10% is bet­ter or worse for your hap­piness than not donat­ing at all.)”

Right, the only dis­agree­ment I have with that piece is this part: “… once you start earn­ing more than about $40,000 a year as an in­di­vi­d­ual, any ex­tra in­come won’t af­fect your hap­piness that much”

From my cur­rent un­der­stand­ing, ex­tra in­come will con­tinue to af­fect hap­piness quite a bit up to at least $115,000 /​ year (on av­er­age for col­lege-ed­u­cated peo­ple in Western Europe and North Amer­ica, in terms of sub­jec­tive eval­u­a­tion of one’s life qual­ity).

And achiev­ing an in­come of $115,000 /​ year is much harder than achiev­ing one of $40,000 /​ year.

I don’t know if it’s more or less re­li­able than past re­search sug­gest­ing a lower sa­ti­a­tion point, but tak­ing the pa­per Jebb et al. 2018 at face value, this is the effect of a 160% in­crease in in­come, from $40k to $105k:

In North Amer­ica, life satis­fac­tion goes from 7.63 to 8.0. Zero effect on pos­i­tive af­fect (effects on pos­i­tive af­fect/​hap­piness are always lower and it’s the mea­sure I think is more re­li­able, which is why we chose the term hap­piness in that quote). Nega­tive af­fect-free goes from 0.7 to 0.74.

Effects in Western Europe are a touch smaller.

Whether this counts as “ex­tra in­come con­tin­u­ing to af­fect hap­piness quite a bit” or “ex­tra in­come not af­fect­ing hap­piness that much” I guess is for read­ers to judge.

For my­self, I would re­gard those gains to be suffi­ciently small that I would think it ir­ra­tional for an ego­ist to fo­cus much of their at­ten­tion on earn­ing more money at that point, rather than fos­ter­ing strong re­la­tion­ships, a sense of pur­pose, or im­prov­ing their self-talk.

Per­son­ally, I also ex­pect even those cor­re­la­tions are over­es­ti­mates of the ac­tual effect of higher in­come on hap­piness, be­cause we know the re­verse is also hap­pen­ing: for var­i­ous rea­sons hap­piness it­self causes peo­ple’s in­comes to rise. On top of that, things like health also cause both hap­piness and higher in­comes, in­creas­ing the cor­re­la­tion with­out in­creas­ing the cau­sa­tion. (Though as I de­scribe in my in­come and hap­piness ar­ti­cle, if you have a differ­ent causal di­a­gram in mind, you could also try ar­gu­ing that it’s an un­der­es­ti­mate.)

Whether this counts as “ex­tra in­come con­tin­u­ing to af­fect hap­piness quite a bit” or “ex­tra in­come not af­fect­ing hap­piness that much” I guess is for read­ers to judge.

I no­tice I have some difficulty think­ing through the im­pli­ca­tions of a 0.5 bump in life satis­fac­tion on a 0.0 to 10.0 scale, es­pe­cially when the 0.5 in­crease is in ag­gre­gate across an en­tire life­time.

On one view, 0.5 doesn’t seem like that much. “7.5 in­stead of 8.0? That’s a neg­ligible effect. Once you’re at 7.5 life-satis­fac­tion-wise, time to fo­cus on other things.”

On an­other view, the 0.5 bump is quite a lot. If 10.0 on the scale is “most satis­fy­ing life pos­si­ble”, go­ing from 7.5 to 8.0 could be a big frickin’ deal. Also could be a big deal if the 0.5 bump cashes out to some­thing like “one less ter­rible day per month, for the rest of your life”.

This con­sid­er­a­tion is prob­a­bly dom­i­nated by mea­sure­ment prob­lems though. When I sub­jec­tively as­sess my life satis­fac­tion, I have trou­ble dis­cern­ing the differ­ence be­tween a 7 and an 8 on a 0-10 scale (though I’m bench­mark­ing on 10 be­ing “best out of the ways my life has tended to go”, not “most satis­fy­ing life pos­si­ble”).

I’ve started us­ing a 0-5 scale be­cause of this gran­u­lar­ity con­sid­er­a­tion. It’s much eas­ier for me to tell apart the differ­ence be­tween 3 and 4 on a 0-5 scale than it is to tell apart 7 and 8 on a 0-10 scale.

This is all to say that a 0.5 bump on a 0.0-10.0 scale might not be sub­jec­tively de­tectable at all to most peo­ple. (Though a 0.5 in-ag­gre­gate effect could still cash out to large sub­jec­tive gains for many peo­ple.)

For my­self, I would re­gard those gains to be suffi­ciently small that I would think it ir­ra­tional for an ego­ist to fo­cus much of their at­ten­tion on earn­ing more money at that point, rather than fos­ter­ing strong re­la­tion­ships, a sense of pur­pose, or im­prov­ing their self-talk.

I agree with this.

The main take­away I’m push­ing here is some­thing like:

“After a cer­tain point, mak­ing more money has se­vere diminish­ing re­turns re: your hap­piness, as does donat­ing lots of money.

So don’t lean on mak­ing lots of money to make you happy, and don’t lean on giv­ing away lots of money to make you happy.”

There’s a temp­ta­tion to use “donate a lot of money to effec­tive causes” to scratch the “sense of pur­pose” itch, which I don’t think works very well (due to the diminish­ing re­turns).

I’m not try­ing to tar­get a straw man. I’m try­ing to speak to a line of thought that feels al­ive in the EA com­mu­nity – some­thing along the lines of “giv­ing effec­tively is a pro­ject worth ex­pend­ing sub­stan­tial effort & re­source on.”

Alongside this view is a corol­lary, some­thing like:

Giv­ing effec­tively will be good, both for you and the peo­ple you’re helping.

I think this corol­lary is of­ten con­veyed im­plic­itly, but feels real re­gard­less.

This corol­lary seems un­der­speci­fied. I think giv­ing effec­tively (and giv­ing a lot) will be roughly as good for you as do­ing any giv­ing at all. I think a more ac­cu­rate ver­sion of the corol­lary would go some­thing like:

Giv­ing effec­tively will be about as good for you as other types of giv­ing, but giv­ing effec­tively can be more de­mand­ing than other types of giv­ing. So there’s of­ten a trade­off be­tween your per­sonal hap­piness & effec­tive giv­ing, es­pe­cially if you’re giv­ing large amounts out of an in­come less than $115,000.

It’s quite pos­si­ble that EA lead­ers already agree with this amended corol­lary, in which case all I’m ad­vo­cat­ing for is be­ing clear about the hap­piness<>giv­ing trade­off.

(And in the case where folks dis­agree with the amended corol­lary, I’m ad­vo­cat­ing for some­thing like “this trade­off is real & we shouldn’t pa­per over it.“)

I don’t think life eval­u­a­tion is the right mea­sure­ment of hap­piness for this though. I’m pretty ego­tis­ti­cal and more in­come would definitely make me hap­pier, well be­yond the thresh­old here. I make about 100k/​year and would definitely be more satis­fied with my life if I made 200k. But, that’s purely from a “feel­ing like a suc­cess”/​so­cial sta­tus stand­point. I have no re­al­is­tic lifestyle use for 200k. I can’t even figure out how to use 100k on lifestyle be­cause the things peo­ple typ­i­cally buy are re­ally bor­ing. So even though mak­ing more money would make me hap­pier, spend­ing more of it on my­self wouldn’t. Pos­i­tive af­fect is bet­ter but may still be af­fected too much by life eval­u­a­tion. So nega­tive af­fect is prob­a­bly the best mea­sure, since it’s more re­lated to the pos­si­bil­ity of suffer­ing due to in­suffi­cient money.

I think you’re ap­proach­ing an in­ter­est­ing point on the earn­ings curve. Prob­a­bly mak­ing $200k and giv­ing away $100k would be more satis­fy­ing than earn­ing $100k and giv­ing away $1,000 (wildly spec­u­lat­ing here).

I’m not sure that mak­ing $100k and giv­ing away $50k of it would be more satis­fy­ing than earn­ing $50k and giv­ing away $1,000 though. After re­flect­ing on it for a minute, I think it prob­a­bly would be, but nowhere near 50x. And you’d be leav­ing a lot of other happy-mak­ing pos­si­bil­ities on the table if you gave away $50k out of $100k (which seems less true for giv­ing away $100k out of $200k).